The Blissful One carried out her master’s written injunction. He did not see her face again. She packed up her trunks the next morning and silently stole away with a racking headache and a set of gold teaspoons which she took in lieu of a month’s wages. The vague female awakened Quixtus and prepared his breakfast. When he asked her whether she could cook lunch, she grew pale but said that she would try. She went to the nearest butcher, bought a fibrous organic substance which he asserted to be prime rump-steak, and coming back did something desperate with it in a frying pan. After the first disastrous mouthful, Quixtus rose from the table. “I give it to you for yourself, my good woman,” said he, priding himself on his murderous intent. “I’ll get lunch elsewhere.”
He back to his club, for the first time for many days. And this marked his reappearance in the great world.
He was halfway through his meal when a man, passing down the room from pay-desk to door, caught sight of him and approached with extended hand.
“My dear Quixtus. How good it is to see you again.”
He was a bald, pink-faced little man, wearing great round gold spectacles that seemed to be fitted on to his smiles. Kindliness and the gladness of life emanated from him, as perfume does from a jar of attar of roses. His name was Wonnacott, and he was a member of the council of the Anthropological Society. Quixtus, who had known him for years, scanned his glad cherubic face, and set him down as a false-hearted scoundrel. With this mental reservation he greeted him cordially enough.
“We want you badly,” said Wonnacott. “Things aren’t all they should be at the Society.”
“The monkey’s tail peeping out between their coat tails?” Quixtus asked eagerly.
“No. No. It’s only Griffiths.” Griffiths was the Vice-President. “He knows his subject as well as anybody, but he’s a perfect fool in the chair. We want you back.”
“Very good of you to say so,” replied Quixtus, “but I’m thinking of resigning from the Society altogether, giving up the study of anthropology and presenting my collection to a criminal lunatic asylum.”
Wonnacott, laughing, drew a chair from the vacant table next to Quixtus’s and sat down.
“Why—— What?”
“We know how Primitive Man in most of the epochs slew his enemies, cooked his food, and adorned or disfigured his person; but of the subtle workings of his malignant mind we are hopelessly ignorant.”
“I don’t suppose his mind was more essentially malignant than yours or mine,” said Wonnacott.
“Quite so,” Quixtus agreed. “But we can study the malignancy, the brutality and bestiality of the minds of us living people. We are books open for each other to read. Historic man too we can study—from documents—Nero, Alexander the Sixth, Titus, Oates, Sweeny Tod the Barber——”
“But, my dear man,” smiled Wonnacott, “you are getting into the province of criminology.”
“It’s the only science worth studying,” said Quixtus. Then, after a pause, during which the waiter put the Stilton in front of him and handed him the basket of biscuits, “Do you ever go to race meetings?”
“Sometimes—yes,” laughed the other, startled at the unexpectedness of the question. “I have my little weaknesses like other people.”
“There must be a great deal of wickedness to be found on race-courses.”
“Possibly,” replied Wonnacott, apologetically, “but I’ve never seen any myself.”
Quixtus musingly buttered a piece of biscuit. “That’s a pity. A great pity. I was thinking of going on the turf. I was told that nowhere else could such depravity be found.”
One or two of Wonnacott’s smiles dropped, as it were, from his face and he looked keenly at Quixtus. He saw a hard glitter in the once mild, china-blue eyes, and an unnatural hardness in the setting of the once kindly lips. There was a curious new eagerness on a face that had always been distinguished by a gentle repose. The hands, too, that manipulated the knife and biscuits, shook feverishly.
“I’m afraid you’re not very well, my dear fellow,” said he.
“Not well?” Quixtus laughed, somewhat harshly. “Why I feel ten times younger than I did this time yesterday. I’ve never been so well in my life. Why, I could——” he stopped short and regarded Wonnacott suspiciously—“No. I won’t tell you what I could do.”
He drank the remainder of his glass of white wine, and threw his napkin on the table.
“Let us go and smoke,” said he.
In the smoking-room, Wonnacott, still observing him narrowly, asked him why he was so interested in the depravity of the turf. Quixtus met his eyes with the same suspicious glance.
“I told you I was going to take up the study of criminology. It’s a useful and fascinating science. But as the subject does not seem to interest you,” he added with a quick return to his courteous manner, “let us drop it. You mustn’t suppose I’ve lost all interest in the Society. What especially have you to complain of about Griffiths?”
Wonnacott explained, and for the comfortable half-hour of coffee and cigarettes after lunch they discussed the ineffectuality of Griffiths and, as all good men will, exchanged views on the little foibles of their colleagues on the Council of the Anthropological Society. Quixtus discoursed so humanly, that Wonnacott, on his way office-wards, having lit a cigar at the spirit-lamp in the club-vestibule, looked at the burning end meditatively and said to himself:
“I must have been mistaken after all.”
But Quixtus remained for some time in the club deep in thought, scanning a newspaper with unseeing eyes. He had been injudicious in his conversation with Wonnacott. He had almost betrayed his secret. It behoved him to walk warily. In these days the successful serpent has to assume not only the voice, but the outer semblance and innocent manners of the dove. If he went crawling and hissing about the world, proclaiming his venomousness aloud like a rattle-snake, humanity would either avoid him altogether, or hit him over the head out of self-protection. He must ingratiate himself once more with mankind, and only strike when opportunity offered. For that reason he would simulate a continued interest in Prehistoric Man.
On the other hand, the newly born idea of the study of criminology hovered agreeably and comfortingly over his mind. So much so, that he presently left the club, and, walking to a foreign library, ordered the works of Cesare Lombroso, Ottolenghi, Ferri, Topinard, Corre and as many other authorities on criminology as he could think of, and then, having ransacked the second-hand bookshops in Charing Cross Road, drove home exultant with an excellent set of “The Newgate Calendar.”
Thus he entered upon a new phase of life. He began to mingle again with his fellows, hateful and treacherous dogs though they were. He was no longer morose and solitary. At the next meeting of the Anthropological Society he occupied the Presidential Chair, amid a chorus of (hypocritical) welcome. He accepted invitations to dinner. Also, finding intense discomfort in the ministrations of the vague female, and realising that after making good all Marrable’s defalcations, he was still the possessor of a large fortune, he procured the services of a cook and reinstated his former manservant—luckily disengaged—in office, and again inhabited the commodious apartments which he had abandoned. In fact, he not only resumed his former mode of life, but exceeded it on the social side, walking more abroad into the busy ways of men. In all of which he showed wisdom. For it is manifestly impossible for a man to pursue a successful career of villainy if he locks himself up in the impregnable recesses of a gloomy house and meets no mortal on whom to practise.
One afternoon, after deep and dark excogitation, he proceeded to Romney Place and called upon Tommy Burgrave whom he had not seen since the day of the trial. Tommy, just recovering from the attack of congestion of the lungs, which had prevented him from attending his great uncle’s funeral, was sitting in his dressing-gown before the bedroom fire, while Clementina, unkempt as usual, was superintending his consumption of a fried sole.
Tommy greeted him boyishly. He couldn’t rise, as his lap was full of trays and fat things. His uncle would find a chair somewhere in the corner. It was jolly of him to come.
“You might have come sooner,” snapped Clementina. “The boy has been half dead. If it hadn’t been for me, he would have been quite dead.”
“You nursed him through his illness?”
“What else do you suppose I meant?”
“He could have had a trained nurse,” said Quixtus. “There are such things.”
“Trained nurses!” cried Clementina, in disdain. “I’ve no patience with them. If they’re ugly, they’re brutes—because they know that a good-looking boy like Tommy won’t look at them. If they’re pretty, they’re fools, because they’re always hoping that he will.”
“I say, Clementina,” Tommy protested. “Nurses are the dearest people in the world. A fellow crocked up is just a ‘case’ for them, and they never think of anything but pulling him through. ‘Tisn’t fair of you to talk like that.”
“Isn’t it?” said Clementina, conscious of a greater gap than usual in the back of her blouse, and struggling with one hand to reconcile button and hole. “What on earth do you know about it? Just tell me, are you a woman or am I?”
Tommy laid down his fork with a sigh. “You’re an angel, Clementina, and this sole was delicious; and I wish there were more of it.”
She took the tray from his knees and put it on a side table. Tommy turned to Quixtus, who sat Sphinx-like on a straight-backed chair, and expressed his regret at not having been able to attend his great-uncle’s funeral.
“You missed an interesting ceremony,” said Quixtus.
Tommy laughed. “I suppose the old man didn’t leave me anything?”
He had heard nothing privately about the will, and, as probate had not yet been taken out, the usual summary had not been published in the newspapers.
“I’m afraid not,” said Quixtus. “Did you expect anything?”
“Oh Lord, no!” laughed Tommy, honestly.
“Then more fool you, and more horrid old man he,” said Clementina.
There was a pause. Quixtus, not feeling called upon to defend his defunct and mocking kinsman, said nothing. Clementina drew the crumpled yellow packet of Maryland tobacco and papers from a pocket in her skirt (she insisted on having pockets in her skirts) and rolled a cigarette. When she had licked it, she turned to Quixtus.
“I suppose you know that I came like a fool to your house and was refused admittance.”
“Well trained servants,” said Quixtus, “have a knack of indiscriminate obedience.”
“You might have said something more civil,” she said, taken aback.
“If you will dictate to me a formula of politeness I will repeat it with very great pleasure,” he retorted. “Put a little honey on my tongue and it will wag as mellifluously as that of any hypocrite who wins for himself the adulation of mankind.”
“Mercy’s sake man!” exclaimed Clementina, in her astonishment allowing the smoke to mingle with her words. “Where on earth did you learn to talk like that?”
Their eyes met, and Clementina suddenly screwed up her face and looked at him. She saw in those pale blue eyes something, she could not tell what, but something which had not been in the eyes of the gentle, sweet-souled man she had painted. Her grimace, although familiar through the sittings, somewhat disconcerted him. She made the grim sound that with her represented laughter.
“I was only wondering whether I had got you right after all.”
“Of course, you got him right,” cried Tommy the ingenuous. “It’s one of the rippingest pieces of work you’ve ever done.”
“The Anthropological Society find it quite satisfactory,” said Quixtus stiffly.
“Flattered, I’m sure,” said Clementina.
Tommy, dimly aware now of antagonism, diplomatically introduced a fresh topic of conversation.
“You haven’t told him, Clementina,” said he, “of the letter you got the other day from Shanghai.”
“Shanghai?” echoed Quixtus.
“Yes, from Will Hammersley,” said Clementina, her voice softening. “He’s in very bad health, and hopes to come home within a year. I thought you, too, might have heard from him.”
Quixtus shook his head. For a moment he could not trust himself to speak. The sudden mention of that detested name stunned him like a blow. At last he said; “I never realised you were such friends.”
“He used to come to me in my troubles.”
Quixtus passed his hand between neck and collar, as if to free his throat from clutching fingers. His voice, when he spoke, sounded hoarse and far away in his ears.
“You were in his confidence, I suppose.”
“I think so,” said Clementina, simply.
To the sorely afflicted man’s unbalanced and suspicious mind this was a confession of complicity in the wrong he had suffered. He controlled himself with a great effort, and turned his face away so that she should not see the hate and anger in his eyes. She, too, had worked against him. She, too, had mocked him as the poor blind fool. She, too, he swore within himself, should suffer in the general devastation he would work upon mankind. As in a dream he heard her summarise the letter which she had received. Hammersley had of late been a victim to the low Eastern fever. Once he had nearly died, but had recovered. It had taken hold, however, of his system and nothing but home would cure him. In Shanghai he had made fortune enough to retire. Once in England again he would never leave it as long as he lived.
“He writes one or two pages of description of what May must be in England—the fresh sweet green of the country lanes, the cool lawns, the old grey churches peeping through the trees, the restful, undulating country, the smell of the hawthorn and blackthorn at dawn and eve—those are his words—the poor man’s so sick for home that he has turned into a twopenny ha’penny poet——”
“I think it’s damned pathetic,” said Tommy. “Don’t you, Uncle Ephraim?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Quixtus with a start.
“Don’t you think it’s pathetic for a chap stranded sick in a God-forsaken place in China, to write that high falutin’ stuff about England? Clementina read it to me. It’s the sort of thing a girl of fifteen might have written as a school essay—all the obvious things you know—and it meant such a devil of a lot to him—everything on earth. It fairly made me choke. I call it damned pathetic.”
Quixtus said in a dry voice, “Yes, it’s pathetic—it’s comic—it’s tragic—it’s melodramatic—it’s nostalgic—it’s climatic—— Yes,” he added, absently, “it’s climatic.”
“I wonder you don’t say it’s dyspeptic and psychic and fantastic,” said Clementina, snatching an old hat from the bed. “Do you know you’ve talked nothing but rubbish ever since you entered this room?”
“Language, my dear Clementina,” he quoted; “was given to us to conceal our thoughts.”
“Bah!” said Clementina. She held out her hand abruptly. “Good-bye. I’ll run in later, Tommy; and see how you’re getting on.”
Quixtus opened the door for her to pass out and returned to his straight-backed chair. Tommy handed him a box of cigarettes.
“Won’t you smoke? I tried one cigarette to-day for the first time, but the beastly thing tasted horrid—just as if I were smoking oatmeal.”
Quixtus declined the cigarette. He remained silent; looking gloomily at the young, eager face which masked heaven knows what faithlessness and guile. Being in league with Clementina, whom he knew now was his enemy, Tommy was his enemy too. And yet, for the life of him, he could not carry out the malignant object of his visit. For some time Tommy directed the conversation. He upbraided the treacherous English climate which had enticed him out of doors, and then stretched him on a bed of sickness. It was rough luck. Just as he was beginning to find himself as a landscape painter. It was a beautiful little bit of river—all pale golden lights and silver greys—now that May was beginning and all the trees in early leaf he could not get that spring effect again—could not, in fact, finish the picture. By the way, his uncle had not heard the news. The little picture that had got (by a mistake, according to Clementina) into a corner of the New Gallery, had just been sold. Twenty-five guineas. Wasn’t it ripping? A man called Smythe, whom he had never heard of, had bought it.
“You see, it wasn’t as if some one I knew had bought it, so as to give a chap some encouragement,” he remarked na?vely. “It was a stranger who had the whole show to pick from, and just jumped at my landscape.”
Quixtus, who had filled up by monosyllables the various pauses in Tommy’s discourse, at last rose to take his leave. He had tried now and then to say what he had come to say; but his tongue had grown thick and the roof of his mouth dry, and his words literally stuck in his throat.
“It’s awfully good of you, Uncle Ephraim,” said Tommy, “to have come to see me. As soon as I get about again, I’ll try to do something jolly for you. There’s a bit of wall in your drawing-room that’s just dying for a picture. And I say”—he twisted his boyish face whimsically and looked at him with a twinkle in his dark blue eyes—“I don’t know how in the world it has happened—but if you could let me draw my allowance now instead of the first of the month——”
This was the monthly euphemism. Against his will Quixtus made the customary reply.
“I’ll send you a cheque as usual.”
“You are a good sort,” said Tommy. “And one of these days I’ll get there and you won’t be ashamed of me.”
But Quixtus went away deeply ashamed of himself, disgusted with his weakness. He had started out with the fixed and diabolical intention of telling the lad that he was about to disinherit him.
He had schemed this exquisite cruelty in the coolness of solitude. In its craft and subtlety it appeared peculiarly perfect. He had come fully prepared to perform the deed of wickedness. Not only had Clementina’s gentle presence not caused him to waver in his design, but his discovery of her complicity in his great betrayal had inflamed his desire for vengeance. Yet, when the time came for the wreaking thereof, his valour was of the oozing nature lamented by Bob Acres. He was shocked at his pusillanimity. In the middle of Sloane Square he stopped and cursed himself, and was nearly run over by a taxi-cab. As it was empty he hailed it, and continued his maledictions in the security of its interior.
Manifestly there was something wrong in his psychological economy which no reading of Lombroso or “The Newgate Calendar” could remedy. Or was he merely suffering from a lack of experience in evil doing? Did he not need a guide in the Whole Art and Practice of Wickedness?
He walked up and down his museum in anxious thought. At last a smile lit up his gaunt features. He sat down and wrote notes of invitation to Huckaby, Vandermeer, and Billiter to dinner on the following Tuesday.